has sometimes allowed us to believe. The second is a white supremacist
vision of Civil War memory, which took many forms early including
terror and violence during reconstruction. It locked arms with
reconciliationist vision many times and delivered the country
an essentially segregated memory of the war by the turn of the
century. The third is the emancipationist vision, embodied in
African Americans complex remembrance of their own truths
and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic
and the liberation of blacks. In the end this is a story of how
the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision
in the national culture."

--"For so long after the civil war, Americans faced an overwhelming
task of trying to understand the tangled relationship between
two profound ideas: healing and justice. On some level, both had
to occur. . . . Human reconciliations are a good thing, but sometimes
reconciliation comes at a terrible cost. The reunion after so
horrible a civil war was a political triumph by the late nineteenth
century, but it was not or could not have been achieved without
the re-subjugation of many of those people the war had freed from
centuries of bondage."

--"As long as we have a politics of race in America, we have
a politics of Civil War memory. For Americans, the Civil War has
been the defining event upon which we have often imposed unity
and continuity. As a culture, we have often preferred the theme
of reconciled conflict to unreconciled complexity. "Dr. Blight's
most recent book is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory (Harvard UP, 2001).

September 19, 2001
Scholarship on Disability at EmoryEmory's gaining a new
scholar of disability studies. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson will
join the Women's Studies Program in the spring of 2002. She is
the author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability
in American Culture and Literature (Columbia University Press,
1977). For more on Garland-Thomson and the emergence of disability
studies, see "Disability
and the Academy: A field comes of age" in the December
2000 / January 2001 issue of the Academic Exchange

September 6, 2001
David Lodge Coming to Campus

If you enjoyed Shalom Goldman's review
essay in the September Academic Exchange,"Academic
Life by the Book: A campus tour of satiric fiction,"
you'll be glad to know one of the great satirists of academic
life is coming to campus soon. Novelist and critic, David Lodge,
whose many books include Changing Places, Nice Work,
and Small World, will be on campus October 710, 2001.
He will give three lectures on "Consciousness and the Novel"
as part of the series of Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literture.
On October 10th, he will give a reading and be available to sign
copies of his new novel, Thinks (Viking, 2001). Below is
a list of dates and places:

A Book Jacket Description of Thinks:
"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally
gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling
Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester,
he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in
artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness.
Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a
tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie to refrain from
philandering in his own backyard. This resolution is already weakening
when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a recently widowed
novelist who has taken up a post as writer in residence at Gloucester.
Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a worldview radically
at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph's bold advances
but resists on moral principle. The standoff between them is shattered
by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm
the truth of Ralph's dictum that 'we can never know for certain
what another person is thinking.'"